So notwithstanding the arrogance here, what were you doing responding to a post from Wellcitedevidence, other than to nudge the mods into another ban? The comment doesn’t even mention you, nor is it about you or your profession.

For more than a week the UK’s headlines have obsessed about a 15 year old who’s missed a week away from school with her maths teacher. At the same time, the Institute of Physics (IOP) has found that nearly half of all state schools in England do not send any girls on to study A-level physics.

IOP president Prof Sir Peter Knight says many girls are not receiving the education they are “entitled to”.

Could we have an article please?

To which despite her claim above, BeautifulBurnout’s response was to get Wellcitedevidence banned for being me:

“For more than a week the UK’s headlines have obsessed about a 15 year old who’s missed a week away from school with her maths teacher.”

Reducing the case to “a 15 year old who’s missed a week away from school with her maths teacher” is the height of wilful ignorance and/or deliberate trollery.

Still at least you are presenting a reasonably consistent position on this.

On the other hand an objective observer might consider it to be an excellent juxtaposition of the UK media’s obsession with sex and scandal and its lack of interest in its education system.

MrsBootstraps then added acomment of mine about the case of Helen Goddard who was jailed for 15 months for a lesbian relationship with a 15 year old student:

When I was fifteen, and if I’d had a sexual relationship with someone just eleven years older than me I’d have been horrified that this would have resulted in a prosecution and a jail sentence. This is an abuse of the legal system in order to express a misplaced moral outrage. Had the teacher been a man, I very much doubt he’d have received a custodial sentence. I hope Helen Goddard appeals successfully.

Secondly were we able to persuade all girls to engage in lesbian relationships we’d be able to solve the problem of teenage pregnancies overnight and that really would be an achievement.

Thirdly as the age of consent is probably one of the most widely ignored laws, isn’t it time it was revised to a more realistic minimum?

Time for something above the line I think.

Not surpisingly MrsBootstraps who played a leading role in the “hang ’em and Flog ’em brigade after Goddard’s trial, failed to add the following that I also posted at the time:

Here’s the view of the judge in the case, Anthony Pitt, as reported in the Times:

“A music teacher who had a lesbian affair with a 15-year-old pupil will be allowed to continue to see the girl after she is released from jail.

“Despite the parents fears that Helen Goddard, 26, will try to rekindle her relationship with their daughter, a judge rejected a prosecution request to ban the teacher from seeing the girl for five years.

“As Goddard sat crying in the dock, Judge Anthony Pitt said that it would be draconian on the girl, who turns 16 next week, to impose a sexual prevention order banning the teacher from seeing her. The court was told that the pair were still in love.”

Hardly what any objective observer would call grooming or paedophilia is it?

As a parent of two girls at the school in question, I would like to make 2 points based on information in the public domain:

1. This was categorically not a relationship based on or initiated through any predatory behaviour. It was a mutual and loving relationship between two people who were perfectly capable of knowing their own emotional states. The 15 year old girl will be 16 next week.

2. Helen Goddard’s professional life is destroyed, and she has been paraded across the country’s newspapers. To send her to prison on top of that is worse than cruel – it is inhuman.

I am appalled by the vindictiveness of some of the reactions (though interestingly not many on this blog – though it is the Guardian). We are surely more civilised than this. Most of the parents i know feel similarly.

So let’s move forward a year and the sentences given to those involved in the rioting, looting, arson and murder in 2011.

She was guilty of having a five month lesbian relationship with a 15 year old student that would in all probability have continued had not some nosy busybody interfered.

In the circumstances your cries of foul about a six month sentence for looting sounds somewhat hollow.

MrsBootstrap has in the past entertained her followers on The Untrusted site about how she removed her teenage son from school in order to educate him at home.

This is a worthy and dedicated thing to do as manyhome learners and their parentscan testify. But whether that’s the case for someone working as a full time barrister and part time internet poster averaging more than 11 posts a day, (is 4 hours a day an unreasonable estimate?) for 4 years on CiF alone, is another matter. Of course her legal work might bring enough to employ a full-time tutor to achieve the minimum educational outcome expected of students at the end of year 11, but as she informs us all too often about the paucity of legal aid work remuneration, I think that’s unlikely.

Now this might be another case of “wilful ignorance” but on the other hand it might be a valid reflection on modern attitudes to education.

a primary or exclusive sexual interest in pubescent individuals aged approximately 11–14 years. Hebephilia differs from ephebophilia, which refers to the sexual preference for individuals in later adolescence, and from pedophilia, which refers to the sexual preference for prepubescent children.

This man still seems to think that when both the law and the teaching code of conduct specifically forbid his actions, and he has brought his teaching career to an end, he professes, according to his lawyer, that love conquers all.

To that extent I agree with you that “Jim has Pagey bang to rights.”

So once again MrsB is only a barrister so can hardly be expected to provide accurate and valid evidence.

That girl’s school should have bloody done something if they knew of this relationship back in January. Would you send your daughter or son to a school which thought it was ok for its staff to have relationships with them, because I wouldn’t.

He must be frantically going through all his archives, searching for anything at all to say that will deflect from the fact that he has been called out on his support for underage sex between adults and young teenagers, and the lowering of the minimum age of consent.

If a 13 year old boy is groomed by a peadophile in their 30s, they should go on the register?

To which my response was:

You’re asking a hypothetical question here, but the paedophile should certainly be on the Register and depending on the nature of the grooming, face prosecution and if found guilty, whatever sentence the court feels is appropriate. The 13 year old would need to be assessed by social workers as would his parents. However the case that Barbara Ellen was writing about concerned a fifteen year old heterosexual.

I was asked:

What exactly are your beliefs regarding the age of consent?

To which my response was:

I believe it varies from no age to 18 depending on the country so clearly there’s not much agreement between the legislators or experts. The age of 16 in the UK is flouted by large numbers of under sixteen year olds to the extent that it has brought this particular law into disrepute. However if it meant a reduction in the level of teenage pregnancies I wouldn’t object to it being raised to seventeen or even eighteen.

Evening all, interesting to read that my judgement of Bitey as a PR man for paedophilia has been vindicated. Not that I’m surprised obviously.

HankScorpio’s judgement is as flawed as his brain is addled from excessive alcohol consumption each Saturday night when so often he sets about verbally abusing even those UT regulars like MrsB whose adulation of this violent, foul mouthed individual is a disgrace to her profession. Although it is of course perfectly in line with her public views on the police.

So what of Hank’s accusation? Little could be so easy to refute.

Here’s what I posted back in February 2009 at the conclusion of the enquiry into Sharon Shoesmith,former Director of Children’s Services in the London Borough of Haringey.

Comment on: Punishing timesBitethehand 07 Feb 09, 12:58pmIf you care to read the articles the Guardian has made available and not just this editorial it is quite clear that the social workers involved in this case, “twice sought legal advice about taking him into care”, but were advised the law did not allow it. This taken with the ease with which the mother and her male partner were able to deceive the social workers, the only real solution is to give social workers unfettered authority to storm into anyone’s house at any time of the day or night, to minutely examine children, conduct a thorough seach of the premises and take any children suspected of being abused in any way into care until the matter is resolved.

And no it won’t happen and neither should it.

The real villain of the piece here is Ed Balls, as Essex points out earlier:

“At the bottom (or top) of this is Ed Balls, who created these bureaucratic monstrosities in the first place. Putting children’s and education services together was nothing more than a stunt to get some press attention in the name of “doing something”. If anyone should have resigned over the failures, it should have been him.”

In time the world will forget about Ms Shoesmith but Ed Balls will forever be remembered as the politician who connived with the most despicable tabloid in the western world to sacrifice a dedicated Director of Children’s Services to save his own skin.

Whatever her shortcomings in this particular case were, which Ms Shoesmith readily admits, the fact is that she was and is a dedicated and talented manager, as the 61 headteachers testifed*, who judged her performance as head of the borough’s Educational Services, as ‘outstanding’. Haringey’s residents who rely on its social welfare services are the losers in this and will continue to be for years to come, as no social worker or manager in their right mind would risk their career and their own mental health by volunteering to work in the borough.

It needs to be remembered that 30 months after this, the poorest parts of the London Borough of Haringey, those who would have suffered most from Ed Ball’s denigration of its Social Services Department, saw the start of the rioting, looting, arson and murder in August 2011.

* The word testified was omitted from the original post due to an error on my part.

Re: Saville, its sick, its abuse, its statutory rape and its a massive betrayal of trust by a lot of people but (and I fear being classed with Bitey here)…

Its not necessarily paedophilia, many/most of those girls were most likely pubescent and paedophilia is an abnormal attraction to pre- pubescent children. It is possible that he did go for younger ones – hard to draw the line growing up is a process, I was pubescent at 9.

But whatever you call it the guy was obviously a sexual predator preying on very young innocent and sometimes very vulnerable women/girls. That’s a vile crime however you define it.

Sounds remarkably similar to my own position earlier on this page.

Of course MrsB can’t help but pretend otherwise and then quotes almost word for word the definition of hebephilia – a proclivity for pubescent teenagers, which again I’d posted earlier. But having correctly distinguished between hebephelia and paedophilia, she then contradicts herself with the following:

Do I whine? Or do I merely cite the evidence needed to demonstrate the desperation of those who resort to such distortion?

Helen Goddard lost her job, her career, her pension, effectively a six figure sum fine, was placed on the sex offenders register and had her international reputation as a promising jazz saxophonist ruined. In a civilised society this would have been considered sufficient punishment for her and a deterrence to others, without an additional 15 month custodial sentence. At the time, in recent cases of teachers involved with students under the age of 16, sentences had varied from a suspended jail sentence to 4 years 9 months.

But then I’d hardly expect MrsBootstraps, the champion of self-made women, the arch-defender of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the scourge of radical feminism to understand or appreciate much about civilised behaviour.

As for the case of Madeleine Martin let me record here some of what I posted:

On the issue that exercised Cath Elliott (MsWoman) so much and which MrsB quotes above, this is what I posted in response to her own accusation at the time:

“Don’t try and squirm your way out of it now by attempting to suggest that it was merely an innocent proposal for a discussion about the number of young people on the Sex Offenders’ Register. What you said – twice – was crystal clear.”

To which I responded:

Oh I stand by my remarks and suggest that any under age of consent teenage male who’s engaged in sexual activity with another person below or over the age of consent should be on the register for the two and a half years that I believe is the tariff for a caution. After all how are other parents of teenage children going to know they are safe and that the authorities are taking under age sex seriously?

And just so we can dispose of any accusations of hypocrisy here, would MrsB volunteer her own teenage son for the register if it transpired that he had been engaged in below the age of consent sex? A simple yes or no will suffice.